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It's not how old you are, it's how you got here.It's been a long road and not all of it was paved.A man is but a product of his thoughts. What he thinks, he becomes. Gandhi

Originally Posted by Carol

When I judge someone's integrity one key thing I look at is - How does s/he treat people s/he doesn't agree with or does not like?
I can respect someone who I do not agree with, but I have NO respect for someone who puts others down in a public forum. That is the hallmark of someone who has no integrity, and cannot be trusted.

I'll respond as if you were attempting to add to the discussion. The countries at the top of the rankings appear to have either national or state level school systems. In the US, we have some folks who think that school systems should function solely at the county or even municipal or special district level.

While I support the right of school systems to spend more of their tax dollars on schools than another school district might choose or be able to do, as a nation we have an interest in seeing that all students have access to a quality education regardless of how shiftless or provincial their parents might be.

Dissenting "viewpoints" like demanding that schools teach "young earth" bullshit alongside or in place of actual science?

More like not wanting your kids to visit a mosque and learn how to pray on their knees, but let's take that as an example. In the marketplace of ideas, good ideas compete with bad ones, and the good ones usually win. If the bad ones do, you end up with a culture of incompetence failure. If the good ones win, you end up with successful people who advance civilization. The only way to discredit bad ideas is to test them, just as you have to test products in a marketplace. Ultimately, you have to let those ideas compete, and you have to trust people to govern themselves. This is why a republic lets people make their own mistakes.

Originally Posted by Novaheart

I'll respond as if you were attempting to add to the discussion. The countries at the top of the rankings appear to have either national or state level school systems. In the US, we have some folks who think that school systems should function solely at the county or even municipal or special district level.

While I support the right of school systems to spend more of their tax dollars on schools than another school district might choose or be able to do, as a nation we have an interest in seeing that all students have access to a quality education regardless of how shiftless or provincial their parents might be.

Again, you're presuming the power to decide what is good for other people's children, regardless of whether you know their circumstances and histories. What makes you so sure that you can decide what a stranger needs to know? Where does this hubris come from?

Again, you're presuming the power to decide what is good for other people's children, regardless of whether you know their circumstances and histories. What makes you so sure that you can decide what a stranger needs to know? Where does this hubris come from?

Again, you're presuming the power to decide what is good for other people's children, regardless of whether you know their circumstances and histories. What makes you so sure that you can decide what a stranger needs to know? Where does this hubris come from?

Like I said in a previous post, the school systems are a part of the economic engine. In a huge country where jobs and populations migrate, there needs to be some consistency in the school systems so that half the students aren't constantly trying to catch up while the other half are bored to tears.

Everyone likes to point to Catholic schools as a model of success in education. Catholic schools do not operate without regional and national oversight. http://www.ncea.org/about/index.asp

It would appear that the model for success would be to privatize and Christianize education. I agree with that.

Why? Because I went to Catholic school despite being raised an Episcopalian? That was because the public school sucked despite at the time being segregated and teaching about God (or operated on the premise of his existence) . The public school also had stricter discipline and corporal punishment.

My Catholic school taught science in Science class and religion in Religion class. The Science teacher didn't teach Creationism and the Religion teacher didn't teach Evolution. And no one seemed to have a problem with that.

The reason that Catholic school works is because the population is self selected and because the parents answer to the school. We behaved ourselves because in a couple of hours our mothers were going to be in the parking lot talking to our teachers and school admins. And above all of this was the "board of education" known as "The Diocese".

We had no physically disabled kids. We had one simpleton who was allowed to attend rather like daycare and kept busy by the principal. We had no kids whose parents were in prison, none whose parents were gangsters, and damned few whose parents were on the equivalent of Welfare. The student body was ethnically homogenous except for one black kid, three Jews, and some gypsies.

While I support the right of school systems to spend more of their tax dollars on schools than another school district might choose or be able to do, as a nation we have an interest in seeing that all students have access to a quality education regardless.............

I think everyone agrees with that. The central part of the "close 'em" movement is that education was actually better before the feds got their hands on it in on Oct 17, 1979. So closing the Dep of Ed has nothing at all to do with the degrading the quality of education in America. It has a great deal to do with expenses.

Like I said in a previous post, the school systems are a part of the economic engine. In a huge country where jobs and populations migrate, there needs to be some consistency in the school systems so that half the students aren't constantly trying to catch up while the other half are bored to tears.

First, if schools are part of the economic engine, then the best possible thing would be to keep government out of it, as governments tend to deeply screw up economies when they start trying to pick winners and losers. Second, if we needed consistency in schools from coast to coast, then you are presuming that the nation is consistent from coast to coast. It isn't. People who are capable of moving to follow jobs are capable of adapting to the changing locales without government-mandated mental standardization. After all, think of all of those immigrants who succeeded here, not because they were already acclimated to America, but because they brought skills and ideas that weren't already here. One-size-fits-all is not conducive to educational excellence.

Originally Posted by Novaheart

Everyone likes to point to Catholic schools as a model of success in education. Catholic schools do not operate without regional and national oversight. http://www.ncea.org/about/index.asp

This is true, but the curriculum in the Catholic schools isn't the same from coast to coast, either. Each Diocese tailors its schools to function most effectively in the community. It's a decentralized approach that we already have in American schools, or at least used to, before the federal government decided to step in.

The above link will lead you to charts which will show you that the efficacy of public education peaked around 1965 - 1972 and has deteriorated ever since.

Feds should get out of it. They failed.

Brass tacks: The period of time you reference has to do with one major cultural shift: integration and forced bussing. Prior to that, we had a lot of good schools, a lot of mediocre schools, and a lot of really bad schools. The bill of goods sold to the American people was that mixing the performing population with the under performing population would bring up the under performing population, when it fact it dragged down the performing population.

The secondary shift was the end of ability tracking and mainstreaming. The parents demanded this. Parents of kids who were not in the A group could never accept that their kids simply did not perform academically. They believed that the school was programing their kids for failure. Blacks and education academics insisted that the tracking system had to be done away with because it would forever shut the black kids out, because they weren't getting the educational support "from society".

This was all supported by the activist and judicial belief that the history of underfunding black schools could only be addressed by bussing, such that it would be impossible to underfund black schools. A surprising number of otherwise intelligent people still believe that majority black schools are underfunded, when in fact they are disproportionately over funded in almost every school district.

The cost of distrust is high. The cost of deception is higher. The cost of dishonesty is highest. When people can't even discuss the situation in terms which actually define it without being screamed at and labeled "racist" then progress doesn't seem likely regardless of whether there is a DOE or not. In fact, the only people who are currently allowed to demand a return to neighborhood schools are poor black people, and the only ones doing that are associated with black separatist and Muslim groups.